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GSoC 2024 Cohort Roundup

· 2 min read
David LeBauer
David LeBauer
PEcAn Project co-PI

As Google Summer of Code 2024 comes to a close, the PEcAn project is proud to highlight the outstanding work of this year's participants. Participating in GSOC over the past eight years has been an opportunity not to expand our code base as well as our community.

This year we had four exciting new projects:

  1. Pratik Prakhale's project "Adopting Data Schema for Field Management Events" defined a JSON schema and integrated it into the FieldActivity R Shiny App. This JSON schema allows for more flexible and standardized data storage of field management events, and makes it easier to expand the FieldActivity App as well as build other robust applications that depend on the Schema. Pratik posted his final report as a a pull request to the Field Activity repository PecanProject/fieldactivity#79.

  2. Abhinav Pandey's "Optimize PEcAn for freestanding use of single packages" project helped to make PEcAn packages more standalone and thus easier for use by the broader community. Many PEcAn R packages depend on each other and to a Postgres database. Abhinav's work refactored code to reduced these dependencies. Abinav posted about hhis "My GSOC experience: PEcAn Project" on DEV.

  3. Sambhav Dixit: "Machine Learning Downscaling of PEcAn Outputs" used Convolutional Neural Networks to enable downscaling of ecosystem model output to high spatial resolution while retaining information contained in ensemble based uncertainty estimates. His final report "Linking Earth System Modeling and Machine Learning: My GSoC Journey with PEcAn" is on Medium.

  4. Meet Agrawal worked on "PEcAn Code Hardening by Integration Tests", a project that enhanced the reliability of PEcAn's codebase by improving integration tests.

These projects helped advance PEcAn's code, provided valuable experiences to both mentees and mentors. We are grateful to the participants, mentors, and everyone in the PEcAn community who continue to make the project and our GSOC experiences a success.